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Hand-made sweets at the Louie Candies factory in Umm al-Fahm. (Dan Keinan) Pleasure hunting / Sweet talk By Ronit Vered Tags: Food, Candy  The doors of the small candy factory on Salameh Street in Tel Aviv are closed now most of the time. Meir and his wife, the owners of Dalia Sweets for the past 30 years, come to the plant one or two days a week and produce a very small quantity of candy. They mainly wait, heartbroken, for someone to agree to take the space for key money. The time of these candies has passed, they say, and they are already tired and in despair. Today a large amount of candy is produced in big industrial plants or imported from abroad, and the customer base for old-fashioned sweets has shrunk to elderly people who still maintain an affection for the pink coconut candies, "marmalada" jelly and caramelized peanuts, and buy them to wax nostalgic over sweet childhood memories. Once there were dozens of small candy factories in Israel, with the simple and innocent names of one of the members of the family, in the best craft tradition. These factories worked around the clock and supplied most of the local demand for candies in an era when no one dreamed of importing sweets from all over the world. The yellow banana candies and sugar crystals and sweets displayed in glass jars were a rare treat for adults and children. Which of the shiny, colored layers of the jelly candy to bite off first? Should one's appetite be satisfied immediately, or should the rare sweet be saved for after supper? When the pleasure is not available in abundance, it tends to become fixed in your memory. Advertisement As the years passed, the number of these factories shrank. Mass-produced and imported sweets dealt a blow to the family businesses that produced cooked-sugar candies, which used traditional methods requiring hand labor and a large number of workers. Any business that grew substantially was swallowed up by the candy giants; those that did not disappeared from the market or barely survived. Another blow came in recent years, with increased awareness of proper nutrition and the substances we ingest. The quantities of sugar and phosphorescent food colorings with which these candies are decorated may be a source of enthusiastic childish amazement, but they are less impressive to today's parents. Although the food colorings are authorized for use by the Health Ministry, it has been a long time since they were considered a guarantee of a healthy life. Today there are only a small number of the old-fashioned factories left. On the large production floor of Louie Candies, established in the early 1970s in Umm al-Fahm, there were once over 30 production workers leaning over pots and mixers. In recent years their number has shrunk by a third. But Ramez Jaber and his brothers, who inherited the factory from their father, Abu Louie, are not giving up and continue to produce coconut candies, marmalada, nougat (halbitza) and other sweets. The Turkish delight (rahat locum) is Ramez's real passion. "His second wife," is what his legal wife complainingly calls it. Turkish delight, whose secrets he learned after months of work as an apprentice in a Turkish plant, delays Ramez's return home as he bends over it for long nights in the factory. The cheap Turkish delight that he produces by the local method, whose capital is Nablus, can be obtained in shops. But by special order, for weddings and festive occasions, he produces the Turkish version, which has heavy surfaces in a marvelous dull yellowish-greenish color, perfumed with rose water, blushing with powdered sugar and embedded with diamonds of almonds and cashews. At Attias Candies, which is responsible for some of the tastiest creations in the genre, they claim that demand is still huge. But they also admit that it's a vanishing craft that may no longer be economically justified. Bella Asael, 70, adjusts the black plastic glasses on her nose and with a knife inserts spots of color into the sausages of soft coconut dough. Next to her stands a huge metal pot of food coloring. The cauldron of bubbling liquid has the deep color of new wine at the start of its fermentation, and it takes effort to stir it with a giant wooden spatula. Asael insists on continuing to work, despite her age. She has been producing coconut candies for 50 years, and her skilled, agile hands are the only ones in the factory that are allowed to color and cut the candies. When she looks at the trays of cut coconut on their way to the packaging machine, she sadly mutters that "once we would pack the coconut by hand and they would pay us according to the number of cartons per day," almost as though she is sorry that machines have taken even this little job away from her. At the age of 16 she began to work at Moti Candies, next to the coconut candy production tables. When the factory was sold she moved to Atlas Candies, and remained even when it was sold, 15 years ago, to Miri and Sami Attias, the present owners. Half a century of expertise and professional knowledge; but Asael will probably not receive the deserved title of "master craftsman," in spite of her breathtaking skill. Fried, her male colleague, who has worked for decades next to the roasting oven and the pots of burning sugar syrup and honey, is responsible for the exemplary uniform golden color of the caramelized nuts. He will probably not receive a prize for lifetime achievement either. Sweet nostalgia Candied fruits, grains and nuts preserved in syrup, jams and preserves are ancient confections that were produced with honey or fruit sugar thousands of years before the rise of sugar made from cane or sugar beets. The Arabs imported sugar from the Far East via Persia and presented it to the Europeans in the Middle Ages. Beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the use of sugar became more prevalent; though it remained an expensive food, fit for kings; methods of producing sweets based on the cooking of sugar began to develop. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period, incidentally, sugar was considered to be a cure for digestive problems and a refresher of the palate between the various courses of a meal; just the opposite of its modern image. On the other hand, back then most people walked around with a mouthfuls of rotting teeth. Our nostalgic candies are for the most part cheap, industrial, modern versions of classical sweets from ancient times. The basic method for producing sweets from cooked sugar is always the same: boiling sugar and glucose. Various ingredients are added to the sugar syrup: tahini to produce halva, cornstarch to produce Turkish delight, and food colorings. The paste that forms is poured into pans, cooled and cut. How is each of them made? Coconut candy: To the sugar and glucose mixture, add shredded coconut. Knead the soft dough that is formed into long cylinders, roll them in food coloring; the most common is the famous pinkish-red; and cut into little snacks that are rolled once again in shredded coconut. Coconut-based candies were made for thousands of years in Southeast Asia and India, the largest food laboratory in the world, which is also the origin of sugar cane. The question of how the coconut candy reached Israel, although it is a very short history of only a few decades, remains a mystery. Some people claim that Moti Sweets, established in 1956 and finally swallowed up by Elite, was the first to produce it in Israel, but they are also unable to explain where the founding yekkes (German Jews) brought the patent from. Jelly candies, or "marmalada": In Europe marmalade refers to a jam made of citrus or other fruit, and is also related to sweets made from fruit dough. Our cheap industrial version is made of sugar, glucose and a jelling substance, usually agar-agar seaweed. The process of producing these jelly candies is long and relatively complex, because the colored mixtures are poured onto long tables and must wait to jell before another layer is poured on. The result is a very beautiful sight of huge glittering surfaces. The source of the difference between the transparent and opaque layers, for anyone who was wondering, stems from the fact that all the raw materials of the opaque layers are whipped. Caramelized sesame, peanuts and sunflower seeds: The modern version of one of the oldest sweets known to man, which even today can still be found in a home-made version in the market stalls. Roasted sunflower seeds and nuts are coated with sugar, which turns into caramel at a high temperature, or with honey. Nougat (halbitza): The recipe for a candy made from honey, sugar and nuts appears in a book by Apicius, the famous Roman chef. Today the name refers to a candy made of sugar, egg white and nuts, and is made in various famous versions all over the world. Bananit (banana candy) and tutit (strawberry candy): Contrary to their specific names, these candies, which today are usually covered with chocolate, have never seen a real banana or a fresh strawberry. Everything is make believe: To the mixture of sugar and glucose they add egg whites or an artificial whipping substance that gives the candy an inflated airy texture, and pink or yellow food coloring that also contains weak flavor concentrates Bookmark to del.icio.us   Grass is greener For the cannabis-growing residents of Lebanon, recent fighting has been a blessing. Piggy bank savings Welfare Minister Herzog unveils a plan to open savings accounts for every Israeli child.

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